NOTES for Gen 1:1-2:3
At first glance, the biblical Poem of Creation may seem to be a purely mythological text, and many regard it precisely this way: as an ancient myth that entered the Bible because no other versions of cosmogony, the teaching about the origin of the world, existed in antiquity. Conversely, there are readers who are certain that the biblical Poem of Creation is history that must be understood literally, exactly as it is written.
What, then, does the author of the poem mean? And when was it written? The generally accepted view among biblical scholars today is that this poem, like the whole so-called Prologue to the Book of Genesis, the book's first eleven chapters, arose in Babylon during the Babylonian Exile. By that time people already knew quite enough about the world to abandon its mythological picture. The issue was clearly not that the author lacked the means to describe the reality he wished to portray.
He simply uses the traditional language of what was called the cosmogonic poetry of his time. Poems narrating the origin and formation of the cosmos already existed then, and the author creates a Yahwistic version of such a poem. It is no accident that he begins the history of the world with God creating “heaven and earth.” However these “heaven and earth” may be understood, and they have been understood in very different ways, one thing is clear: this refers to the universe in all its fullness and integrity.
This integrity can, of course, be destroyed. The second verse of the first chapter speaks precisely of the “earth” torn away from “heaven,” of integrity destroyed, and then chaos appears in the world. More precisely, it is the part severed from the whole that sinks into chaos: it becomes formless and without qualities, “formless and void” in the Synodal translation.
This is what the “earth” torn away from “heaven” becomes: a part of the universe separated from the whole. Then the majestic picture of creation unfolds, already within space and time, which come into being together with creation itself. This creation contains a certain drama that the author does not describe directly but at which he hints. At first, on the “first day,” all creation is permeated by light, not physical light but the light of God's presence, which in Yahwistic spiritual experience is often accompanied by radiance.
Yet on the “second day” something happens in the world: chaos takes the place of the radiant “one day” (precisely one, rather than the first in a series of other days). Water bursts into the world, the same water mentioned in the description of the “earth” torn away from “heaven,” water as a symbol of chaos. God overcomes this chaos, setting a boundary to it and creating the world as if anew within the water, building there, in the space He formed within chaos, a new world in which it has fallen to us to live. There, in this new world, the human being will also appear, in turn to enter the drama of the universe, where he will have a special role, and it will depend on the human being alone how that role is fulfilled.